Texel- November 6, 2008

A few weeks ago Martijn was reading his magazine that we get free from the ANWB (like AAA in the US) and he spotted something interesting that we could do when we came up here – The Schipbreuk en Juttersmusem. Schipbreuk means shipwreck, and jutten means to scavenge beaches. So a jutter is a person who scavenges beaches for interesting things. One such person is the man who founded the museum, Jan Uitgeest. He's been scavenging the beaches for things that have washed ashore for the past 56 years and has amassed quite a collection! The museum has a lot of life preservers, buoys, fisherman gloves, and other “normal” boat things that you might expect. But the interesting things are the unexpected ones: four thousand cans of powdered milk, televisions, hard hats (apparently lots of people lose their hard hats at sea), suitcases, and tennis balls.

We headed over to the museum and realized once we got there that we had no cash on us. Well, that's not completely true. I had two 50 cent coins in my pocket and Martijn had at least four 5 cent coins, so we weren't quite destitute, but it wasn't enough to pay the entry fee. So we said we'd be back and Meneer Uitgeest told us to go inside and after we were done to come back and pay later! I thought that was quite generous and we really enjoyed the time we spent there. The video of him explaining some of his funny adventures was all in Dutch but I was able to piece together some of it, and Martijn helped me by explaining a lot of it afterward. After we left and did a couple of geocaches we finally found an ATM so we could pull out some money and go pay the man! He laughed and said thanks for coming back to pay since he'd completely forgotten. We even got an autographed brochure.

The caches we went after were in the dunes known as De Muy. The first one was a rather quick find, but the second one involved some walking and climbing of lots and lots of stairs. I shouldn't complain though, at least I wasn't trying to walk my way up a huge pile of sand. There was a really lovely view from the top.

That's the sea way off in the distance, shrouded in the FOG!